Month: June 2018

OpEdNews 6/29/18 Veterans Today

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series: Read it and weep!

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

1892 Caricature of Cecil Rhodes, master British imperialist of the 19^th century, was the consummate empire builder with a philosophy of mystical imperialism. As intended, the Rhodes Scholarship continues its influence on American thinking from a British perspective.  [Public Domaine].

“Brzezinski however couldn’t do much until the death of Dubs. And the death of Dubs removed the last obstacle. Then came Herat… They killed a lot of Russians and the Russians were very upset. But it gave a shot in the arm to the resistance in this country [the U.S.]. That was March of ‘79. So the coincidence of Dubs’ death and the Herat uprising gave Brzezinski control of the policy from then on.”                                               Interview: Selig Harrison February 18, 1993

The kidnapping and assassination of Ambassador Adolph Dubs on February 14, 1979 at the Kabul Hotel ended any meaningful effort by the U.S. to prevent a Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. The death was employed however from that day forward by President Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski as the opportunity to increase the level of provocation for luring the Soviets into their own “Vietnam quagmire” and keeping them pinned down for as long as possible. Because of “Spike” Dubs’ death, Zbigniew Brzezinski finally got control of foreign policy; got his hard line neoconservative policy toward the Soviet Union pushed through, ended support for détente once and for all, and put Strategic Arms Limitation on hold. Hafizullah Amin continued to seize power for himself, sew discord throughout the countryside with his education and land reform programs, fracture his political party the PDPA and game the Soviet leadership by asking them to intervene militarily fourteen times, knowing full well they were dead set against a military intervention.

Selig Harrison writes in his 1995 book with Diego Cordovez, Out of Afghanistan, “On the one hand, he [Amin] continued to call upon massive Soviet help in financing his regime, equipping it militarily and providing technical personnel for military operations against rebels. On the other, he resisted Soviet control, brushing aside pressure for a slowdown in reforms and for greater Soviet involvement in running the secret police and the military.”

Continuing his coup d’état in Washington, Brzezinski and his military assistant General William Odom proceeded with plans for the radical transformation of America’s nuclear doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction – MAD (directed mainly at the Soviet Union) into one of  nuclear “war-fighting” through a series of Presidential Directives. Most of these directives excluded the State Department in the decision-making and remain in force to this day. Based entirely on the fallacious assumption that the Soviet Union believed they could fight and win a nuclear war, President Carter, Brzezinski and General William Odom set out to win one of their own and build the weapons with which to do it.

Contrary to Jimmy Carter’s glowing public image as a peace-president and future Nobel Peace Prize winner, behind the scenes the former Navy man would embrace Brzezinski’s vision of an inevitable conflict with the Soviet Empire and relish his role as the nuclear war-fighting Commander in Chief fighting it to his last breath.

Author Tim Weiner quotes General Odom in his 1990 exposé, Blank Check, “Carter became the first President to immerse himself in the details of nuclear war-fighting scenarios. The President ‘really got into the procedures, ran through numerous scenarios, and became very comfortable with it,’ Odom told a Harvard seminar in 1980.”  Knowledge of Carter’s dark side has gone unrecognized over the years but despite the end of the Cold War in 1991, the horrifying product of his decision-making has remained intact with each succeeding administration. Presidential Directives (PDs) 53, 58 and 59 didn’t just lower the threshold for nuclear weapons use, they encouraged it; making it appear probable that America’s elites could save themselves in a protracted nuclear war of up to six months, regardless of the consequences to the nation or its population. Based on an invented threat of nuclear annihilation carried into the Carter administration by Brzezinski, PD 59 would form the groundwork of the unnecessary Reagan buildup in the 1980s which would then form the groundwork of the post-Soviet Wolfowitz Doctrine of American imperial supremacy that followed. As Tim Weiner noted with irony in 1990, “The President who vowed to rid the world of warheads wound up signing the first truly significant war-fighting plan since the heyday of Curtis LeMay.”

But the real irony of the Carter presidency wasn’t in his reprise of the mad bomber role from Doctor Strangelove; the real irony was that the greatest success of his presidency – the U.S- Egypt-Israeli peace treaty of 1979 – was not arranged by his skill at diplomacy or his desire for a Middle East peace but by an off the books agency doing Zbigniew Brzezinski’s dirty work in Afghanistan known as the Safari Club. John K. Cooley writes in his 1999 exposé on U.S.-backed terrorism Unholy Wars, “Just before the Afghanistan war began, and because the Safari Club was keeping both Israeli and US intelligence informed of its actions, the Club was able to help bring about President Sadat’s historic peacemaking visit of November 1977 to Jerusalem, leading to the US-Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979… Morocco’s representative in the Safari Club hand-carried Rabin’s letter to Sadat. King Hassan then sponsored the first secret meeting in Morocco…”

Egypt’s Anwar Sadat would play an important role in the upcoming war in Afghanistan, supplying old Soviet weapons to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s so-called Freedom Fighters in an effort to fool the American public and Congress into thinking the weapons came from Soviet and Afghan defectors surrendering to CIA-backed rebels. Sadat would upset his handlers in Washington in September 1981when he spilled the beans on the secret operation and would die by assassination exactly two weeks later, but at that point his usefulness to the Safari Club had ended.

President Carter hadn’t been assassinated as “Spike” Dubs had been and Hafizullah Amin would soon be, but he was served up as an unwitting participant in his own coup d’état before he’d even entered the Oval office. In the wake of the Church Committee hearings and Watergate and with the President’s knowledge and assistance, Zbigniew Brzezinski had rewired authority for covert action from the State Department to the National Security Council in what has been described as “a bureaucratic first strike of the first order”. A Cercle of old European power had then detached the administration, sealed off the CIA in Washington from further damage and run its operations out of the Middle East. The head of French external intelligence, Pinay Cercle member and Safari Club coordinator Alexandre de Marenches had stepped in to fill the breach during the crisis, aided the operation through the Bank of Commerce and Credit International and set the stage for a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that would drag on for nearly 10 years. John K. Cooley writes, “The Safari Club player who probably helped most to draw the US into the Afghan adventure was Count Alexandre de Marenches… He had cooperated actively with the United States in warfare and covert operations since World War II. He believed it to be of advantage to France, as well as to his American friends and allies, to form a group like the Safari Club to protect and advance Western interests in the Third World.”

The death of Ambassador Dubs, the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late December 1979 doomed Carter’s reelection to failure. Afghanistan was soon to become the self-fulfilling prophecy of Soviet iniquity that the neoconservative, right-wing alliance had been trying to create for decades; a permanent, ongoing crisis in U.S.-Soviet relations which it had precipitated and then claimed to uncover and respond to. Alexandre De Marenches had done his part to put all the pieces in place. Brian Crozier and Robert Moss had written the script and Brzezinski had sold it to the highest levels of the American government. De Marenches had even knowingly tipped off his cousin, Newsweek’s Arnaud de Borchgrave to be in Kabul ahead of the invasion to catch the action; action that the President of the United States (Carter) would later claim he had no foreknowledge of. But without the constant propagandizing of Brian Crozier and his protégé Robert Moss working behind the scenes with their influential colleagues, the sale of a right-wing coup d’état of the U.S. might never have taken off.

1980: THE SPIKE

If anything represented the payoff to the decade of neoconservative/right-wing subversion being worked on the American psyche by the Institute for the Study of Conflict, it was the 1980 publication of the fiction/fantasy/spy-novel The Spike. Whether or not the title was a perverse inside joke or a veiled reference to the death of American Ambassador “Spike” Dubs in Kabul the year before, The Spike would prove to be the Pinay Cercle’s final nail in the coffin of U.S./Soviet relations. Viewed in hindsight The Spike plays out as poorly written paranoid political propaganda masquerading as fact. But viewed from the fevered perspective of the American mass media of 1980 in the run up to the election of Ronald Reagan, the #1 bestselling novel by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss was nothing less than proof of the KGB’s evil “plot to destroy the U.S., exposed.”

“A humdinger by two of the savviest foreign correspondents in the business.” Wrote William Safire in the New York Times. “A thundering rebuttal to the architects of détente, critics of the CIA and editors of the opinion-forming, powerhouse newspapers from the East.” Wrote the Dallas Morning News.  “A thriller that is several steps ahead of the headlines.” Wrote the San Francisco Chronicle.

Praise from the mass media for The Spike and its two authors reads like an endorsement from Britain’s MI6 and the CIA. But to investigative journalist Fred Landis, who’d served as a consultant for the Subcommittee on CIA Covert Action in Chile of the Church Committee, Moss and de Borchgrave were anything but “two of the savviest foreign correspondents in the business”. To Landis they were coldblooded mercenaries, bought and paid to legitimize the right-wing’s agenda especially when the price was right. Landis writes in Inquiry Magazine that December, 1980 “Moss and de Borchgrave have built careers out of peddling gossip from right-wing French, Israeli, British and American intelligence agents that conforms to their one-dimensional ‘us versus them’ view of world affairs. The Spike is simply a logical, if paranoid extension of the propaganda they have hitherto seen fit to call fact. The book is thus an elaborate joke—the real disinformation lies between its two covers.”

But the elaborate joke of disinformation perpetrated by Moss and de Borchgrave was just what the neoconservative/right-wing had been using for decades to create their own reality. Thinly disguised fiction acting as fact would put the actor Ronald Reagan in the driver’s seat for eight years, keep the Soviets locked in a war to destabilize Central Asia for ten years and permanently destabilize the Middle East and South Asia with Islamic extremism.

As intended by the right-wing Pinay Cercle agenda, the coup of the century did turn the American government away from détente and peaceful coexistence. In befitting Brian Crozier’s “ultimate sophistication of subversion” it did get candidate Ronald Reagan elected who would complete the neoconservative/right-wing takeover of the American government while accelerating its privatization and politicization begun under Carter. And they would never give it back. The collapse of the Soviet Union did free Zbigniew Brzezinski’s treasured Eastern Europe from Soviet occupation and bring to an end the Soviet Empire. But as the intervening years have shown, ending Soviet Communism was not the end of history as claimed by the neoconservative pundit Francis Fukuyama. In fact, ending the Cold War only returned the world to an earlier and far more dangerous pre-World War I version of relations known as Great Power Competition and opened a Pandora’s box of old and new evils from which world stability is now reeling.

POSTSCRIPT: The lonely imperialist: Afghanistan, Brzezinski and the unintended consequences of Imperial Graveyards.

It’s 2018 and we’ve been here before. The pattern and the profile of events parading across our screens today mirrors the pattern and profile of events set out in the late 1970s by the Carter administration which paralleled the pattern and the profile of late 1940s and the genesis of the original Cold War. Following the death of Ambassador Adolph Dubs in February, 1979 we saw the outline of that pattern emerging in which a new reality centered on Afghanistan was beginning to form.

Our observation drew us personally into the debate over the arms race when we began production of a documentary on the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) which we called Arms Race and the Economy: A Delicate Balance. As production preceded numerous experts including Senator Ted Kennedy, SALT negotiator Paul Warnke and economist John Kenneth Galbraith clarified our understanding of the damage that a massive new diversion of tax dollars and capital investment into war spending would represent to the civilian economy, following Vietnam.

On the surface the mainstream media was selling a new arms race on the basis of a neoconservative-invented “Soviet threat” but the reality was very different. Galbraith insisted that accelerated defense spending and renewing the Cold War would ultimately destroy the civilian economy. He was convinced that the Cold War had already helped rigidify the capitalist system by bureaucratizing a large part of production for non-productive uses. He saw America becoming more and more like the Soviet Union, ruled by a military-industrial-academic establishment immune from reality.

That fall, in Washington, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency was one of the last holdouts in a sea of hysterical accusations about the Soviet Union.  At the time we didn’t realize that a slow motion coup d’état against détente and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks had been going on since 1976 and was nearly complete. The bureaucracy was in thrall to the neoconservative’s Team B experiment which had discredited the CIA’s professional analysis of the Soviet “threat” and replaced it with an ideological one. Were the Soviets really planning a massive first-strike nuclear attack on the United States as the neoconservatives were predicting? Was SALT II really just a public relations scheme by Moscow to lock in American weakness while it prepared for war?

Looking back we know that these claims were based on the falsified intelligence, outright lies and fabrications of the neoconservatives. But when the Soviets crossed their southern border into Afghanistan it acted like a trance on the system, left and right. Afghanistan was of the lowest level of diplomatic interest to the United States. It was a far off South Asian country bordering the Soviet Union of absolutely no importance and had been relegated to the Soviet Sphere of influence during the Eisenhower administration. Numerous administrations had passed up Afghan requests for military assistance not wishing to disturb the balance of power in the region. Yet, when President Carter labeled the invasion, “the greatest threat to peace since the second World War” he gave the enemies of détente and SALT a new and reinvigorated Cold War and legitimized building the newest weapons with which to fight a nuclear war.

We now know that the decision to trap the Soviets in Afghanistan had already been decided long before their “surprise” invasion of December 27, 1979. The President’s reaction was political theatre. But at the time no one concerned about preserving SALT or détente inside the bureaucracy protested what they knew was really a politicized overreaction. Afghanistan had changed everything. By the time our program aired that winter, the argument was no longer whether our government should call a halt to the nuclear arms race and reinvest in the civilian economy. The U.S. had stepped through the mirror back to 1947 and the debate refocused not on whether, but on how much was to be spent to counter Soviet aggression.

As the first Americans to gain access to Kabul after the Soviet invasion for an American TV crew in 1981 we got a close-up look at the American narrative supporting President Carter’s new anti-Soviet agenda and it simply didn’t hold up. What had been presented within days of the December 1979 invasion as an open and shut case of Soviet expansion toward the Persian Gulf by Harvard Professor and Team B Project leader Richard Pipes on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour could just as easily have been defined as a defensive action well within the Soviets’ legitimate sphere of influence. Three years earlier, Pipes’ Team B Strategic Objectives Panel on the CIA’s estimate of the Soviet threat had been accused of subverting the very process of making national security estimates by inventing threats where they didn’t exist and intentionally skewing its findings along ideological lines. Now those invented threats were being presented as facts by America’s Public Broadcasting System.

In 1983 we returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation Project Director Roger Fisher for ABC’s Nightline. Our aim was to establish once and for all the credibility of the American claims. We discovered first hand from high level Soviet officials that they wanted desperately to abandon the war but the Reagan administration simply refused to take their requests seriously. From the moment they entered office, the Reagan administration had taken a conflicting position, demanding on the one hand that the Soviets withdraw their forces, while at the same time keeping them pinned down through covert action with the intention of holding them there. This hypocritical campaign, though lacking in a foundation of facts and dripping in right-wing ideology, was embraced by the entire Washington political spectrum and left willfully-unexamined by America’s mainstream media.

The final blow to Roger Fisher’s efforts came when he offered the New York Times a detailed article describing his belief that a negotiated settlement could be quickly achieved. The Times’ editor responded that Roger could write the article but it wouldn’t necessarily be published.

At a conference conducted by the Nobel Institute in Lysebu Norway in 1995, a high level group of former U.S., European and Soviet officials faced off over the question: Why did the Soviets invade Afghanistan? Former National Security Council staff member Dr. Gary Sick established that the U.S. had resigned Afghanistan to the Soviet sphere of influence years before the invasion. So why had the U.S. chosen to overreact the way it did?

To Jimmy Carter’s veteran CIA Director Stansfield Turner, responsibility could only be located in the personality of one very specific individual who ironically wasn’t present. “Brzezinski’s name comes up here every five minutes; but nobody has as yet mentioned that he is a Pole.” Turner said. “This is an important part of the equation, it seems to me. None of us can escape our individual backgrounds; but in this case, the fact that Brzezinski is a Pole, it seems to me was terribly important.”

What Turner meant was that Zbigniew Brzezinski had punched an ethical hole into U.S. policy by infusing his old world ethnic hatred of Russia, into U.S.-Soviet relations. U.S. officials were not supposed to bring racist beliefs into the public policy-making-process. But anybody who knew Brzezinski at the time knew full well that is exactly what he was doing.

In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Brzezinski ironically grew wary of America’s global overreach, much of which he had made possible with his actions as Carter’s National Security Advisor.

Although he had felt justified at using his imperial hubris to draw the Soviets into their own Vietnam and destroy Afghanistan in the process, he did not expect to see the same imperial process at work undoing the United States and in the same way he had undone the Soviet Union.

A year before he died in 2017, the architect of America’s use of Imperial power to attain global dominance made a startling about face in an article titled “Toward a Global Realignment” warning that “the United States is still the world’s politically, economically, and militarily most powerful entity, but given complex geopolitical shifts in regional balances, it is no longer the globally imperial power.”

Brzezinski warned that the time for conflict among nations had come to an end because “During the rest of this century, humanity will also have to be increasingly preoccupied with survival,” a survival that could only be addressed “in a setting of increased international accommodation.”

Had Zbigniew Brzezinski used his powerful influence on American policymakers to be more accommodating to the Soviet Union over Afghanistan instead of using it as the bait to lure them to their destruction during the 1970s, the world and the United States today would, no doubt be in a very different and a much better place.

Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserve

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series

Part 1: MI6 intelligence has always been an anti-Soviet/Russian “Rumor Factory”

Part 2: America’s “Soviet problem” is the old “Russia problem” that European Imperialists have been facing since Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812

Part 3: How U.S. foreign policy came to be directed by a diabolical, London-backed, privately funded, neoconservative/right-wing alliance

Part 4: How the Safari Club became the real CIA

Part 5: Brzezinski’s Safari Club “Friends” Did the Dirty Work Behind the Scenes

Part 6: The Death of Adolph Dubs – Cui bono? ‘To whom is it a benefit?’

Part 7: The Coup d’e’tat –

OpEdNews 6/28/2018  Veterans Today

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series: Read it and weep!

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Justice, one of the four theological virtues by Vitruvio Alberi, 1589-1590.   Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic

“On the morning of February 14, 1979, four Afghan terrorists stopped the Ambassador’s car and abducted him as he was travelling from his residence to the Embassy. By 8:50 a.m., the terrorist had taken Dubs to a second floor room in the Kabul Hotel… Despite U.S. Embassy urgings to engage in “patient negotiations,” Afghan police stormed the room just after noon, and shots were fired. When U.S. Embassy officers were able to enter the room, they found the Ambassador dead from several gunshots.”              The Kidnapping and death of Adolph Dubs: Official Summary

After nearly 40 years the February 14, 1979 kidnapping and assassination of U.S. Ambassador Adolph Dubs remains an enigma. At the time, Cyrus Vance’s State Department and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s National Security Council were deeply divided over policy toward the Soviet Union, Iran and Afghanistan. U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph Dubs and Brzezinski held diametrically opposed objectives to the Marxist government of Nur Mohammed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin which, given the increasingly unstable political climate promoted by Brzezinski, undercut the ambassador and put him in great jeopardy. The Brzezinski/Vance divide came to a head at the Kabul Hotel that February 14; yet basic questions about the political maneuvering inside Washington that had caused the crisis for Dubs and who might have benefitted from his death have never been answered.  Why did Adolph Dubs die at the Kabul Hotel, who killed him and most glaring of all, who benefitted; or as the age old term the Roman’s used for assigning guilt would ask, Cui Bono?

Early reports that the four kidnappers (at least one dressed in a police uniform) were members of a Chinese-trained Tajik-Maoist splinter group of the ruling Marxist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) known as the Setam-i Melli have never been confirmed but are strongly suspected. Neither are the names of the kidnappers known, nor whether it was they or the police who killed the ambassador as they stormed the room in violation (of what the US claimed) was an agreement to patiently negotiate the Ambassador’s release.

No one would ever take credit for the kidnapping, the bitterly divided Afghan regime would not allow the Americans access to the evidence, the crime scene was quickly sanitized and Zbigniew Brzezinski would immediately seize upon Hafizullah Amin’s refusal to accept responsibility and lack of a formal apology as proof of his pro-Soviet, anti-American bent. The kidnapping and assassination of Adolph Dubs would provide the spark to swing opinion in Washington toward Brzezinski’s desire for a more aggressive destabilization of Amin’s government that in turn would lead to exactly what Ambassador Adolph Dubs had died trying to prevent; a Soviet military occupation.

Two Separate events, each with different motives

The debate in Washington was over responsibility for the Ambassador’s death. It focused mainly on whether it was Afghans or Soviet advisors who had ordered the assault and not on the motives of the kidnappers or the actions of the embassy and the American ambassador himself. But if Brzezinski had been correct about it affirming Amin’s pro-Soviet credentials, why had the terrorists chosen an American to voice their protest and not a Soviet? Was Dubs’ plan to draw Amin closer to the U.S. working? Did the kidnappers want to damage Afghanistan’s relationship to the U.S. as Hafizullah Amin later claimed? Or was there another reason for leveraging the life of the American ambassador that neither the Afghans, the Soviets nor the Americans at the embassy were aware of.

As described in an interview conducted for Washingtonian Magazine in 2017 with Bruce Flatin, the political counselor dispatched by the U.S. embassy to the hotel that morning, the whole affair just didn’t add up. “Why not go to some house way out in the suburbs?, he wondered. Or a safe house in the country, or a cave up in the mountains, where authorities couldn’t so easily corner them? Why would Dubs’ captors, whoever they were, hole up at a busy, central hotel, in a room with street-facing windows, no escape route, and not even a phone for conducting negotiations?” And most of all, “Why was Dubs the pawn in what was an Afghan problem? It didn’t make sense.”

And the death of the ambassador that followed made even less sense to an Afghan government struggling to find itself; unless the kidnapping of Adolph Dubs didn’t start out as a kidnapping and his unfortunate death wasn’t the result of a botched rescue attempt, but was a deliberate assassination intended to trap Hafizullah Amin in the role of a Soviet puppet while at the same time removing Dubs as the last remaining obstacle to an ongoing plan.

A False assumption: The “kidnapping” of Adolph Dubs

At a 1995 Nobel Symposium (pages 80-81) on the causes of the Afghan war – in the presence of former CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner, the former Director of Soviet affairs at the National Security Council, General William Odom and dozens of former high-level U.S., Soviet and European officials – the leading Russian authority on the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the military historian General Alexander Lyakhovsky delivered testimony on the Dubs’ killing which resolved part of the mystery and turned the existing narrative on its head.

“Then there was the episode where the American ambassador was killed. What were the circumstances? My account is based on my conversations with our secret services who were in charge of monitoring the crisis. One of the officers of the secret service told me that Dubs was seen in the company of those same people who kidnapped him later in the same hotel—in the same room—the day before they kidnapped him. And then later Dubs was in his car, with a travel case. He stopped his car when those same people who he saw the day before ordered him to stop, as if they were known to him. You understand that we are talking about an ambassador with an armored car, bullet—proof windows, doors that can be opened only from the inside, it has a siren that goes off in an emergency situation. Dubs did not use any of these emergency measures. He opened the door himself, let the people who kidnapped him in the car. They came to the hotel and demanded that their extremist friends, who were in prison be released. And then Amin ordered the hotel to be stormed. Both the Americans and us pleaded with Amin not to storm the hotel.”

Even today, twenty seven years after the demise of the Soviet Union, most of the reports on the Dubs’ assassination rely on blind speculation or resurrected anti-Soviet Cold War assumptions. But Lyakhovsky’s account provides for new possibilities to explain oddities about the kidnapping that up to now couldn’t be considered.

Under pressure from Brzezinski and the NSC’s Thomas P. Thornton, Ambassador Dubs had been driven to meeting outside the normal channels. Dubs was known by the embassy to have allowed the police to stop and search his car despite his diplomatic immunity – presumably as a safety check before meeting secretly with Amin. Selig Harrison spoke to Bruce Flatin about it in 1989, “[T]he ambassador had talked with Amin fourteen times, often in unannounced meetings, before Dubs was killed in February 1979. No record of the content of these exchanges has yet surfaced.” And they never would. According to interviews conducted by Henry S. Bradsher for his 1985 book, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union,  U.S. officials back in Washington denied published reports that “Dubs had frequent lengthy discussions with Amin,” while insisting that his reports “did not indicate he felt that he was making any progress toward convincing Afghan officials that they should resist Soviet influence.” But as Selig Harrison makes clear in his 1995 book with Diego Cordovez, Out of Afghanistan, Dubs was careful NOT to inform Washington of his progress with Amin out of fear that in the prevailing climate which Brzezinski ruled, it would have cost him his credibility.

According to Lyakhovsky’s account Dubs had gone to the Kabul Hotel on the 13^th of February to meet with four men most likely aligned with the U.S. but opposed to the Taraki/Amin regime. Judging by their demands on the 14^th, these men would have been supported by agencies friendly to the American mission, presumably in Pakistan, Iran or China. Soviet intelligence reports from the era indicate that in January 1979, Beijing had made an attempt to unite the “scattered groups of Afghan Maoists,” including “Setam i Melli and other splinter groups,” whose “program task” was the overthrow of the Afghan government. Recall that prior to his overthrow in April 1978, Prince Mohammed Daoud had ordered the Americans to stop meeting with the Afghan left but the Americans had not complied. Now, in one possible scenario, Dubs could have informed these pro-Maoist leftists that he did not want Amin overthrown and was ending their support by the embassy. An agreement was reached and a final payment of some sort agreed to. The next day – suitcase in hand – he was stopped at a prearranged spot by the same four men he’d met with the day before but for some unknown reason the conditions had now changed. Whatever the deal that had been struck now involved the release of Tajik/Shiite Maoists imprisoned by the regime. The Kabul Hotel was the worst possible location for such a transaction and the room 117 was indefensible. The decision to return to that room made absolutely no sense unless one of the four “kidnappers” was leading Dubs and the other three into a trap to which the busy Kabul Hotel was a key.

Dubs had put himself in the middle of a factional fight between anti-Pashtun Tajik/Shiite Maoists and pro-government Pashtun nationalist unaware that they were all being manipulated by an international criminal conspiracy working on behalf of Brzezinski’s agenda to use Hafizullah Amin and three of the “kidnappers” as patsies to lure the Soviets into their own Vietnam.

Why assault the room?

Based on published accounts it’s fairly certain that four men arrived at the hotel with Dubs but agreement on every other aspect of the so called “kidnapping” and death ends there. According to the Afghan report of the events three were killed in the room with Dubs, a fourth kidnapper was wounded and a short time later died of his wounds. The Americans claimed that two kidnappers were killed in the room, a third was taken alive downstairs early on and was later seen being taken from the hotel “alive and relatively unharmed.”

A third account by Soviet KGB defector Vasiliy Mitrokhin maintains that of the four terrorists “Two died in the attack, one was taken into custody, and one escaped – it isn’t clear how,” suggesting that the fourth kidnapper had been helped.

Echoing Brzezinski’s longstanding practice of automatically claiming Soviet culpability before the facts were even known, the American report – leaked to the Washington Post by anonymous sources – openly claims a Soviet responsibility for Dubs’ death. Newsweek’s Ron Moreau cited unnamed “U.S. congressional sources” stating that “the Russians had wanted Dubs to die.” But Mitrokhin goes out of his way to insist that whatever influence KGB advisors might have had on the Afghan police that day, there was no “preconceived Soviet plot to kill Dubs.”

The Afghans produced four dead bodies for the Americans that evening and claimed they were the kidnappers. Bruce Flatin recognized the two that had died with Dubs and a third who’d been taken alive from the hotel, but the fourth was a man he had never seen before. “In Kabul,” Flatin told his Washingtonian interviewer, “it was easy to get a fourth body—right out of the jail. So there he was, the fill-in.” The autopsy revealed that Dubs had been killed by 4 shots to the head delivered at close range from a .22 caliber weapon. Not the kind of weapon, according to Flatin, used by Afghan soldiers or police, but the favorite type of weapon used by professional assassins.

No one has ever suggested the existence of a separate non-governmental agency in the death of Adolph Dubs, nor even hinted at it. The existence of the Safari Club was only formerly acknowledged to have existed by the one-time head of Saudi Arabian Intelligence Prince Turki Al-Faisal at a Georgetown University event in 2002.  But the Safari Club’s no-compromise, anti-Communist agenda had been brought directly into the White House with Brzezinski’s National Security Council in 1977 and it had been active in Afghanistan long before February 14, 1979. If ever there was an opportunity for their 1,500-strong “black network” of CIA misfits, malcontents, assassins and enforcers to act on Brzezinski’s agenda to lure the Soviets into their own Vietnam, it was at room 117 of the Kabul Hotel on February 14.

Hafizullah Amin later took full responsibility for Dubs’ death and absolved the Soviets, saying they had nothing at all to do with the decision-making. The case was supposed to be closed but it was clear that in addition to Dubs, the other target that day was Hafizullah Amin and thanks to Zbigniew Brzezinski for the next ten months he’d be left to twist in the wind as bait for a Soviet invasion.

Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series

Part 1: MI6 intelligence has always been an anti-Soviet/Russian “Rumor Factory”

Part 2: America’s “Soviet problem” is the old “Russia problem” that European Imperialists have been facing since Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812

Part 3: How U.S. foreign policy came to be directed by a diabolical, London-backed, privately funded, neoconservative/right-wing alliance

Part 4: How the Safari Club became the real CIA

Part 5: Brzezinski’s Safari Club “Friends” Did the Dirty Work Behind the Scenes

Part 6: The Death of Adolph Dubs – Cui bono? ‘To whom is it a benefit?’

Part 7: The Coup d’e’tat –

OpEdNews 6/26/2018  Veterans Today

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series: Read it and weep!

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Robert Moss became a shamanic dream teacher starting in 1987 after leaving a career as an intelligence operative, specialized in creating anti-communist propaganda, with the CIA, MI6, Institute for the Study of Conflict and membership in the Pinay Cercle.  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

“IRAN WAS OF increasing concern to the 6I. The Imperial Throne was under siege from an alliance against nature between Shi’ite fundamentalists and Marxists. Apart from unsubtle repression by the Iranian secret service, the SAVAK, and by the armed forces, little was being done to break the unholy alliance. SAVAK was unversed in the arts of psychological action.”

Brian Crozier, Free Agent 1941-1991

Brian Crozier knew a lot about alliances against nature. After “spending several days closeted” with General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, helping the dictator draft (in Spanish) fifteen clauses for a new Constitution, he turned his attention in early 1978 to Iran and decided the Shah needed his advice. Warning the Shah that: “The CIA had virtually collapsed and its operational capacity had been reduced to zero,” Crozier counseled that the British alone could not save him and offered him the services of his “shadowy organization,” known as the 6I. A few months later the Shah agreed and Crozier returned with a team of advisors including the Shah’s old friend Antoine Pinay of the Pinay Cercle.

Combined with Vietnam, Iran was cause for a fevered panic inside Brian Crozier’s right-wing fascist circles of power. The Cold War strategy of suppressing Communism with military force had failed spectacularly in Vietnam and was now crumbling in Iran and Crozier, his prote’ge’ Robert Moss and Zbigniew Brzezinski were pushing the idea (with no proof) that Moscow’s meddling was behind it. In his book on the Iran fiasco, All Fall Down, former National Security Council staff member Dr. Gary Sick acknowledges Moss’s undeserved influence on Washington’s policy-making by citing Moss’s December 2, 1978 article in the New Republic, “Who’s meddling in Iran?”

“Brzezinski” reproduced the Moss article, circulated it to the president and other top policy makers, and cited it in policy meetings for weeks. Although Moss cited no real evidence and had no apparent qualifications as a specialist on Iran, his article attained the status of a major document in U.S. policy-making circles at a key moment.”

Moss, was of course wrong. As Gary Sick further cites, “the central organizing force of the revolution” was the religious network operating out of the mosques under the strategic control of Khomeini,” and not the Soviets. But the idea that it was the Soviets and not their own policy failures that were wrong, was just what Washington’s bureaucracy wanted to hear.

The Shah’s Persian “empire” was at its core a backward, impoverished third world country with enormous social problems and a crushing military budget. According to a 1974 Newsweek cover story America’s vital Iranian ally had spent $4 billion of his $20 billion dollar oil revenues on arms purchases from the United States in the first six months of 1973 alone, acquiring 289 fighter jets, 500 attack helicopters, 700 tanks, and six destroyers. $10 billion in foreign aid had gone to foreign governments to “expand his sphere of influence” while SAVAK had grown into one of the largest (and most feared) intelligence services in the world with somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 full-time personnel and an estimated 3 million (12 percent of the population), informers.

Obsessed with the Soviet’s “grand design” to conquer the Middle East, the Shah had even constructed an invasion force for neighboring Afghanistan just in case Prince Mohammed Daoud fell to Soviet subversion, but his plan proved useless given the absence of popular support for Daoud following the bloody April, 1978 Marxist coup.

The CIA’s best laid plans for their “policeman in the Gulf” had proved an expensive farce which the U.S. had no strategy for rescuing and out of desperation, the Shah came begging to Brian Crozier for help. “In November of 1978, the Shah sent the top civilian in the SAVAK hierarchy to London to see me,” Crozier writes in his autobiography Free Agent. “I arranged for him to be closeted with Robert Moss for a whole week” The outcome was a Conflict Study dated November 1978, ‘The Campaign to Destabilize Iran’ by Robert Moss. Shortly after the study had appeared, the Iranian charge d’affaires informed me that the Shah had authorized a first annual payment of -1 million to The 6I for a psychological action operation on the lines we had suggested to him.”

Crozier found a welcome audience with the Shah as he had with numerous other fascist dictators like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and Spain’s Francisco Franco and would quite soon with U.S. President Ronald Reagan . The Shah had been installed by the U.S. and Britain at the height of its post-World War II power. But confidence in America’s omnipotence had ended with Vietnam and Europe’s old imperialists were quickly filtering back into their old colonies with their old habits to pick up where they’d left off. The British had been running covert and overt operations in the region since the 18^thcentury. Generations of sons, grandsons and great grandsons of operatives who’d served the British Raj remained on the scene as journalists, businessmen and informal agents. One word from Crozier or Britain’s MI6 intelligence service was all they needed to reactivate.

Joining Brian Crozier and his prote’ge’ Robert Moss in engaging the Shah that autumn was a senior Chinese intelligence officer and veteran supporter of Mao by the name of Qiao Shi. John K. Cooley writes, “In September of 1978, on the way home to Beijing from one of his Balkan missions, Qiao Shi stopped over in Tehran to see the Shah of Iran, who was ill with cancer” Qiao Shi proposed to the Shah a new alliance to thwart Soviet expansion, especially in neighboring Afghanistan” Agreement was reached to undertake a covert war in Afghanistan, apparently independent of CIA plans for the same country.”

According to Cooley, shortly after the Maoist Qiao Shi’s agreement with the Shah’s SAVAK Chief, General Nasser Moghadam, “Chinese agents began to move into position in Pakistan. Liaising with Pakistan’s ISI was the Iranian ambassador in Islamabad, former head of SAVAK.” Instigated by Brzezinski and backed by the CIA and MI6, the so called China-Iran-Pakistan axis began to flourish with Qiao Shi and other “senior Chinese military intelligence officials,” adding to Brzezinski’s ongoing destabilization.

The American Ambassador Adolph Dubs needn’t have worried about Hafizullah Amin’s well known affiliation to the CIA. He had far bigger problems. Not only were Afghan rebels openly training in Pakistan but by the late fall of 1978 Chinese intelligence risked a Sino/Soviet war by training Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Islamists over the Chinese border in Xinjiang province. In addition there was the CIA’s Saudi-funded stockpile of misfits and malcontents roaming the countryside, manning the Safari Club’s 1,500-strong army of assassins and enforcers. And last but not least were the Chinese supported Maoist groups like Setam-i Melli, Sholah Jaweed and SAMA operating from bases on the Pakistan and Iranian borders and programmed by Beijing to bring down their Pashtun oppressor, Hafizullah Amin.

Thanks to Saudi Intelligence chief Sheikh Kamal Adham and BCCI banker, Sheikh Agha Hasan Abedi, there were ample funds to finance a holy jihad against Russia in Afghanistan but the motives for undermining Russia on its southern border didn’t stop there. Bringing war to Afghanistan provided the opportunity to assist the migration of the heroin trade from Southeast Asia to the Pakistani/Afghan border and to make billions of dollars for the BCCI doing it. Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Provinceshad been targeted early on by international drug syndicates eager to find a new home as the Vietnam War wound down. Cited in a French Study by Catherine Lamour and Michel R. Lamberti originally published in 1972 titled Les Grandes Manoeuvres de l’Opium ,“Afghanistan and northern Pakistan represent a source of opium as yet virtually untapped by European traffickers” Situated at the junction of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the two territories are not as far from Marseilles or Munich as are Burma and Laos. The political conditions in their opium producing areas make these places an ideal refuge where racketeers from Europe could go about their business untroubled by international law enforcement agencies.”

As of the early spring of 1978 the narcotics problem in the Golden Crescent, appeared to then Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near East and South Asia Affairs Adolph Dubs to be under control by the governments of the United States, Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. But by January of 1979 the newly unstable region was fast becoming the launch pad for the greatest heroin empire in history and the primary financing source for a terrorist campaign that would transform the world.

The Frankenstein political monster emerging to thwart Dubs’ plan for Afghanistan could only have come from Brzezinski’s ethnic experiment called the Nationalities Working Group . The potential for stirring up Muslim unrest against Soviet/Russian rule had been kicking around for decades but gained little traction within the CIA. But the rise of the neoconservatives following the Vietnam War had brought with it an ethnic strategy that put Saudi Wahhabists , Iranian Shiites, Tajik Maoists, assorted Marxist-Leninists and Afghan extremists together with European and Middle Eastern racketeers – fed by a Trotskyist hatred for all things Russian.

Contrary to Brzezinski’s assertion that Hafizullah Amin was Moscow’s obedient servant, Dubs was learning that his target was not much of a Communist, convincing him to restore and expand a U.S. military training program for Afghan army officers. Russian documents reveal the Kremlin didn’t consider him to be a Communist at all but “a commonplace petty bourgeois and an extreme Pushtu nationalist” with “boundless political ambitions and a craving for power” in addition to most likely being a CIA agent. According to Selig Harrison, Amin had even bragged to him that the Soviets needed him more than he needed them. The trick was to maintain a balance of American influence while not triggering Soviet countermeasures that would bring them in. But for the ambassador who’d been sent to rope Amin closer to the U.S., Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor seemed to be doing everything in his power to put the rope around Dubs’ neck. Still, Dubs continued his mission; Selig Harrison writes, “Dubs, meanwhile was arguing vigorously for keeping American options open, pleading that destabilization of the regime would provoke direct Soviet intervention” Ironically, while Brzezinski was promoting armed opposition to Amin, Dubs was continuing to nurture his dialogue with the Afghan leader.”

A Time magazine article that January suggested Brzezinski’s campaign to frame the Kabul regime as hopelessly pro-Soviet was on the verge of being exposed as a lie. “The new government in Afghanistan of President Noor Mohammed Taraki is commonly thought to be in Moscow’s pocket, especially since it recently signed a friendship treaty with the Soviets. There are signs however, that this too may be an exaggeration. During Taraki’s visit to Moscow last month President Brezhnev reportedly chided him for behaving too obsequiously before the Russians, which he felt made the Afghan leader look bad. As soon as they got back to Kabul, Afghan officials began to drop hints that they would welcome more Western aid. Apparently, the Russians are not altogether satisfied with their new client regime in Kabul.”

But Brzezinski’s objectives were not to be undone by appearances, protests from the ambassador or reasoned political arguments. That same month, Brzezinski’s NSC director of South Asian affairs, Thomas P. Thornton, arrived in Kabul to shut Dubs down. Meeting with Amin, he provided a “negative assessment” of the regime, recommending that any additional aid be cut off.

In the interim between Dubs’ arrival in Kabul in July of 1978 and the fall of the Shah on January 16, 1979 American foreign policy in Iran, China and Afghanistan had shifted into the hands of a neoconservative/right-wing cabal with hardly anyone being the wiser. Backed by Brzezinski’s National Security Council but run by a consortium of right-wing intelligence officers including

France’s intelligence chief, Count Alexandre de Marenchesand his cohorts at the Pinay Cercle, Safari Club and 6I, the decades-long geopolitical plan to move the United States into alignment with the old European right-wing of Antoine Pinay and Brian Crozier was nearing completion.

Regardless of Brzezinski’s public denials about supporting the Afghan rebels, the CIA’s “secret” program to lure the Soviets into their own Vietnam was becoming so well known it was making headlines in the American papers and a mockery of the Carter administration. Selig Harrison writes: “By early February 1979, this collaboration became an open secret when the Washington Post published an eyewitness report that at least two thousand Afghans were being trained at former Pakistani bases guarded by Pakistani patrols.” Yet President Carter and his Secretary of State never seemed to realize that increased destabilization on the Soviet Union’s southern border would eventually produce Soviet counter moves to offset it.

By mid-February the unholy alliance between Shi’ite fundamentalists and Marxists that Brian Crozier had warned the Shah about only months earlier had been turned against Kabul by remnants of the Shah’s Savak and Chinese intelligence. The Shah had fallen and the Afghan countryside was in open revolt. The Marxist regime of Nur Mohammed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin was calling on Moscow for military assistance and the only man left to hold back a Soviet military takeover in Kabul was the American Ambassador, Adolph Dubs. But on the morning of February 14, 1979 he too would fall into the hands of the covert plan to give Russia its own Vietnam and in a tragic twist of irony, become the vehicle for the very operation he had gone to Kabul to stop.

Copyright – 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series

Part 1: MI6 intelligence has always been an anti-Soviet/Russian “Rumor Factory”

Part 2: America’s “Soviet problem” is the old “Russia problem” that European Imperialists have been facing since Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812

Part 3: How U.S. foreign policy came to be directed by a diabolical, London-backed, privately funded, neoconservative/right-wing alliance

Part 4: How the Safari Club became the real CIA

Part 5: Brzezinski’s Safari Club “Friends” Did the Dirty Work Behind the Scenes

Part 6: The Death of Adolph Dubs – Cui bono? ‘To whom is it a benefit?’

Part 7: The Coup d’e’tat –

OpEdNews 6/24/2018 Veterans Today

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series: Read it and weep!

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Entrance of the Safari Club; a ‘supranational’ intelligence agency formed in 1976 by France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Morocco to create a ‘second CIA’ to operate covertly when Congress limited the activities of the CIA.  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike

“The Safari Club set a precedent and some guidelines for the subsequent CIA operation in Afghanistan. As its name implied, the Safari Club’s main task was to carry out missions – always anti-Communist ones, for America, on the ‘good guys’ side of the Cold War…” John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars, 1999

The Safari club represented the true essence of what CIA Director Allen Dulles had intended when setting up the Central Intelligence Agency following World War II; an autonomous covert action organization with global reach, beyond the jurisdiction of American democracy and responsible to no one. A spinoff of the right-wing Pinay Cercle as a secret off-the books “Private Sector Intelligence agency,” and in league with the CIA and Brian Crozier’s 6^th International, the Safari Club was only formerly acknowledged in 2002 by the one-time head of Saudi Arabian Intelligence Prince Turki Al-Faisal to have come into existence in 1976.  But as revealed by John K. Cooley in his groundbreaking 1999 study, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, the Safari Club members had been active informally for years secretly protecting CIA assets and covert operations from the prying eyes of Congressional investigators following Watergate and the revelations of the Church Committee hearings on 30 years of CIA coups, cover-ups and assassinations.

Cooley writes, “The Carter team adopted a method of avoiding the stigma of direct CIA involvement in covert operations which could go wrong and backfire on the United States. It was a method which Henry Kissinger… had refined and applied with skill: get others to do what you want done… the ‘others’ in Kissinger’s era of the early 1970s, a time of rehearsal for the approaching adventure in Afghanistan, were a set of unlikely colleagues…”

Kissinger’s set of unlikely Safari Club colleagues included, France’s Count Alexandre de Marenches chief of French external intelligence, The Shah of Iran, King Hassan II of Morocco, President Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt and Kamal Adham, head of intelligence for Saudi Arabian King Faisal. More to the point, the Safari Club was more than just an off-the-books spy operation doing covert operations for the CIA whose methods the Carter team adopted. The Safari Club was the real CIA, covertly funded by Saudi Arabia and run out of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by the CIA’s former director Richard Helms, U.S. Ambassador to Iran from 1973-1977.

As presented by one-time CNN Special Assignment investigator Joe Trento in his 2005 exposé Prelude To Terror, “Both Prince Turki and Sheikh Kamal Adham [head of Saudi intelligence] would play enormous roles in servicing a spy network to replace the official CIA while it was under Congressional scrutiny between the time of Watergate and the end of the Carter administration… Several top U.S. military and intelligence officials directed the operations from positions they held overseas, notably former CIA Director Richard Helms, at this time Ambassador to Iran.”

According to Trento, at this time, Sheikh Kamal Adham took control of intelligence financing for the United States by setting up a network of banks with the official blessing of the CIA’s George Bush; turning “a small Pakistani merchant bank, the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), into a worldwide money-laundering machine, buying banks around the world in order to create the biggest clandestine money network in history.”

Working alongside the bank’s founder Sheikh Agha Hasan Abedi, Adham not only gained “a comprehensive knowledge of U.S. intelligence operations,” but expanded the very concept by using BCCI to merge the Safari Club’s objectives with “every major terrorist, rebel, and underground organization in the world.” A 2001 Time magazine report found that the bank functioned as “a vast, stateless, multinational corporation that deploys its own intelligence agency, complete with paramilitary wing and enforcement units, known collectively as the “black network:’” a black network that would threaten, bribe or assassinate anyone it needed to turn Afghanistan into the place to trap the Soviet Union in their own Vietnam.

Trento writes, “Adham did not rely simply on money to carry out the plan. Adham and Abedi understood they would need muscle.  They tapped into the CIA’s stockpile of misfits and malcontents to help man a 1,500-strong group of assassins and enforcers.”

1973: The Red Prince Daoud overthrows the King

To most of Washington, the bloodless 1973palace coup of the Afghan King Zahir Shah by his cousin and former Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud along with a faction of the Afghan left was a non-event. But to the Safari Club’s Shah of Iran, Daoud’s coup signaled a leftward drift and provided the opportunity to demonstrate his influence as America’s policeman in the Gulf. Considered to be too friendly to Moscow (which had earned him the nickname the Red Prince), Daoud was known primarily for his repeated claims to Afghan (ethnic Pashtun) provinces seized by the British during the 19^th century in (what is today) Pakistan. Due mainly to America’s lack of interest in the country, the U.S. State Department viewed Daoud mostly as an Afghan nationalist and a nuisance. Afghanistan rated at the bottom of U.S. foreign policy priorities and had since the end of the British Raj in 1947, been cast into the Soviet’s sphere of influence. But as president, Daoud planned to break the mold and needed the West’s economic assistance to do it. He had come to the newly oil-rich Shah of Iran for help but found himself at the mercy of the notorious Safari Club and the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK.  South Asia expert Selig Harrison writes, “On the one hand, Teheran used its aid leverage to press Daoud for the removal of suspected Communists. At the same time, Savak channeled U.S. weapons, communications equipment, and other paramilitary aid to anti-Daoud groups.”

The Shah’s campaign against Daoud quickly drove him to unceremoniously dump the Afghan left, but not before a coalition of CIA-backed agents from Pakistan and Iran had come together to organize his enemies on the left and the right against him. Harrison continues, “Pakistani harassment of Daoud reached its climax in a series of Islamabad-orchestrated raids on police posts in the Pansjer valley. Savak, the CIA and Pakistani agents were also involved in the abortive, fundamentalist-backed coup attempts against Daoud in September and December 1973 and June 1974.”

One Pakistani-trained group involved in the Pansjer raids were the Setam-i Melli (Against National Oppression), a Tajik-based Shiite/Maoist splinter group broken-away from the Marxist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA).  As pro-Chinese and anti-Pashtun, the Setam and a variety of other Shiite /Maoist groups would find themselves attractive to Chinese intelligence and at odds with both Prince Daoud and the Pashtun dominated PDPA and were driven underground. But as Chinese involvement in Afghanistan grew, they would return in a mysterious role that would spontaneously deliver the pivotal element Zbigniew Brzezinski would need to enact his grand plan.

Mohammed Daoud fought off the CIA’s initial intrusions from Savak, the CIA’s Pakistani agents and their fundamentalist (soon to be) holy warriors. But with Western influence in Southeast Asia closing out in Vietnam in 1975, a new Great Game for Central Asia was about to begin. And without the State Department knowing much about it, President Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was busy moving the chess pieces into position.

April 1978: Daoud goes down in an unusually bloody coup

Brzezinski’s plot to weaponize China against Russia by sacrificing Afghanistan was straight out of James Burnham’s Machiavellians. The spontaneous April, 1978 Marxist coup against the King’s cousin, Mohammed Daoud played like clockwork directly into his “predictions” of Soviet infiltration and subversion but on close inspection appeared to fit too conveniently. Nobody at the State Department had expected Daoud to be overthrown by Communist agents because it wasn’t in their interests to do so, nor did it in any way satisfy a broad range of Soviet interests. The Indian expert M.S. Agwani of Jawaharlal Nehru University offered this cogent analysis at the time:

“On the eve of the fateful events of April 1978 Afghanistan seemed to be the most unlikely candidate for a Communist take-over. And there were at least two good reasons for that. First, the Communist movement in Afghanistan did not possess the necessary means—in terms either of a well-oiled party machine or of a popular base—to launch a successful revolution on its own. Secondly, there was no apparent ground for Afghanistan’s Communist neighbor to encourage revolutionary action in that country. On the contrary, a Communist take-over in Afghanistan could offer no advantage to the Soviet Union, in terms either of security or of influence relationship, which it did not already possess.”

Of course, Zbigniew Brzezinski ignored what to everyone else was obvious. Selig Harrison writes of the coup, “Vance recalls that the April coup was depicted by Brzezinski as the opening gambit in a Soviet master plan for achieving hegemony in Southwest Asia. It would be followed in due course, Brzezinski argued, by the incorporation of Afghanistan into the Soviet orbit (which the U.S. had already accepted) and ultimately by political and military moves to subjugate the Gulf oil-producing states.”

As Secretary of State, Vance found no basis for Brzezinski’s argument and rejected it out of hand.  Despite Brzezinski’s subterfuge, the State Department was still committed to preserving détente and moving on with the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, SALT. U.S. Ambassador Theodore Eliot expressed positive feelings toward the new Afghan regime and believed the U.S. could find a way to work with them. But in spite of the State Department’s position, Brzezinski’s plan had already been set in motion and by the spring of 1978 was taking on a life of its own.

Brzezinski Plays the China Card

The decision by Zbigniew Brzezinski to “play” China against Russia at the expense of détente and SALT II would set off a chain of events that would eventually bring the Vance/Brzezinski struggle into stark relief and American foreign policy into deep crisis. Brzezinski had traveled to China only weeks after the April takeover and used the coup as an opportunity for promoting a revolutionary U.S.-China military alliance against the Soviet Union based on his false claim that they were behind it. Exaggerating the coup as frightening evidence of the Soviet’s grand design, Brzezinski mimicked Brian Crozier’s trumped-up predictions, offering to cooperate on Afghanistan and share high-level secrets about Soviet capabilities with the astonished Chinese. In one stroke, Brzezinski had used the coup to singlehandedly turn American foreign policy toward his anti-Soviet position – leaving Cyrus Vance twisting in the wind and making the death of détente a fait accompli.

The State Department’s Soviet specialist Raymond Garthoff writes, “Whether President Carter fully realized it, in overriding Secretary of State Vance’s objections and sending Brzezinski to Beijing he set in train the development of a rapprochement with China on an anti-Soviet basis. The President did not intend the China card as a counter to Soviet and Cuban activities in Africa, but his action had much broader and deeper consequences . . . it is very unlikely he realized he was giving priority to Chinese relations at a time and in a way that would contribute to American-Soviet estrangement.”

Whether or not President Carter understood he was contributing to American-Soviet estrangement by befriending China on an anti-Soviet basis, we now know that within a year, Carter formerly sanctioned Brzezinski’s bold plan to use Afghanistan to lure the Soviet Union into its own Vietnam and later lied to the public about it when the Soviets fell into the trap. But as Joseph Trento writes, Carter’s deceptive ignorance of Brzezinski’s efforts didn’t end there. “Carter may in fact have signed his directive in July 1979, but the Safari Club’s Islamic fighter had been taunting Moscow into invading for nearly a year before that. The effort included cross-border raids into Soviet territory.”

Afghanistan’s April coup organizer, Hafizullah Amin was well known to the KGB having been brought to the U.S. twice under a CIA funded education program designed to turn future third world leaders into agents for American interests. The KGB did this sort of thing in the third world as well but none had played out quite so fortuitously for the U.S. side as Hafizullah Amin. After failing to receive his doctorate Amin had left New York in mid-1965, gone back to Afghanistan and taken a job at Kabul University’s Institute of Education “virtually run by American aid advisors” according to former Associated Press Moscow bureau chief Henry S. Bradsher, author of 1983’s Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. From there he joined the Khalq faction of the leftist Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan, PDPA and became its central organizer. While using his teaching position to recruit young students Amin worked his way up to a leadership position, distanced himself from the Soviets but stayed in regular contact with the Americans. According to an Afghan source close to Amin whom we interviewed, he also maintained close ties to the Islamist right, and especially to his fellow Pashtun tribesman, the notorious Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Enter Ambassador Adolph “Spike” Dubs

Replacing Ambassador Theodore Eliot three months after the Marxist coup, Adolph “Spike” Dubs arrived in Kabul in July 1978with an urgent mission: Bring Hafizullah Amin over to the American side and keep the Russians out. As stated to us in an interview we conducted with Selig Harrison in 1993. “Dubs… came out there with a very sophisticated conception of what he was going to do politically; which was to try to make Amin into a Tito – or the closest thing to a Tito/Ceausescu – detach him. He’d still be pretty close to the Russians but he’d have more freedom of action and it would be enough to make it safe from our point of view.”

President Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski on the other hand, had already engineered a grander mission: Pressure Hafizullah Amin and the Afghan Marxists to increasingly draw on Russian support through destabilization from Iran, Pakistan and China and then keep them tied down long enough to give the Soviets their own Vietnam. Ambassador Dubs was working from the standard State Department playbook in courting Amin and met with him 14 times, according to Selig Harrison. But Brzezinski’s ongoing destabilization through the Safari Club, his budding military relationship with the Chinese and Amin’s provocative behavior toward the Russians was making life for the American ambassador increasingly dangerous.

So alarmed was Adolph Dubs by Amin’s behavior he demanded to know from his CIA station chief if he was employed by the CIA. He was told no and the CIA has always denied that Amin was their covert agent, but the facts speak louder than the denials. Denying responsibility is standard practice for an agency engaged in covert operations and Brzezinski had been running a covert operation since taking over as national security advisor to President Carter in January of 1977. According to the now legendary April 1, 1967 Ramparts Magazine Article “Three Tales of the CIA” the CIA recruited lots of Afghan students during Amin’s era who returned home to become key, high level officials in the Afghan government including the cabinet and state treasury.  According to a Harrison interview with resident American Afghan expert Louis Dupree, Amin made no secret of his CIA connection telling him: “He took American money for his school and then, behind their backs, recruited the brightest teachers for the Communist Party. But you can imagine how it all looked to the Russians.”

Hafizullah Amin may not have been an “agent” but two specific classifications may apply to his covert role. The term “nonofficial cover” (NOC) pertains to individuals working at the deepest levels of CIA covert operations but without any official backing. The other is Controlled American Source (CAS) which the State Department describes in one of its own documents “is a code name for the CIA”. Author Richard D. Mahoney claims in his book about American Taliban member John Walker Lindh Getting Away with Murder that CAS was the classification assigned to Hafizullah Amin.

But whether a CAS or an NOC, the perception that Amin was CIA was all that was needed to spook the Kremlin’s Soviet gerontocracy into taking the bait that Brzezinski had laid out for them. And as his plot moved forward into January of 1979, Ambassador Dubs found himself at the center of a Saudi-funded Safari Club operation that would not only give the right-wing the revenge for Vietnam they so longed for, but transform Afghanistan into the center for Islamic terrorism and the heroin capital of the world.

Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series: Read it and weep!                                                  

Part 1: MI6 intelligence has always been an anti-Soviet/Russian “Rumor Factory”

Part 2: America’s “Soviet problem” is the old “Russia problem” that European Imperialists have been facing since Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812 Part

3: How U.S. foreign policy came to be directed by a diabolical, London-backed, privately funded, neoconservative/right-wing alliance

Part 4: How the Safari Club became the real CIA

Part 5: Brzezinski‘s Safari Club “Friends” Did the Dirty Work Behind the Scenes

Part 6: The Death of Adolph Dubs – Cui bono? ‘To whom is it a benefit?’

Part 7: The Coup d’état –

OpEdNews 6/24/2018 Veterans Today

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series: Read it and weep!

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Satan before the Lord United States public domain tag

“This decidedly mixed record [of successful and failed African coups] did not prevent the return of some of the mercenaries to the world scene, this time to Afghanistan. By the early 1970s London had become a center of the arms trade as well as of the recruiting of already trained ‘soldiers of fortune’ to serve both as trainers and in operational roles… There was a covert group of such personnel, available for hire, and known in London as ‘the Circuit’ or sometimes simply as “the lads.”  John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars, 1999

Even at this late date few Americans understand how the U.S. government came to be owned by the London-backed neoconservative/right-wing alliance that grew out of the post-Vietnam era and how its obsessive compulsion to forge “the one ring to rule them all” has driven the U.S. and its NATO cohorts into an apocalyptic hysteria. Neither do they understand that it was the presidency of James Earl Carter and not Ronald Reagan that opened the door to the rise of Islamic extremism, the sellout of the middle class and the disenfranchisement of America’s constitutional values.

Whether he admired Jimmy Carter or not, Brian Crozier and Zbigniew Brzezinskiwere of one mind when it came to disbelieving in “mutual coexistence” or power-sharing with the Soviet Union and Brzezinski’s membership in the Washington Institute for the Study of Conflict, WISC proved it. The deep bureaucratic influence of Crozier’s new institute could be measured in its choice of board members all of whom had been actively preparing the ground for an ideological rollover for decades. Thanks to WISC member Richard Pipes and the Team B, Brzezinski could now bring Britain’s radical right-wing formula for social change right into the Oval Office and the new President from Georgia was ready and willing to sign on.

Working closely after the election with Carter and one of Henry Kissinger’s former National Security staffers, David Aaron, on the Island retreat of St. Simon, Brzezinski devised a simple structure that channeled all executive decisions into two committees, the Policy Review Committee (PRC) and the Special Coordination Committee (SCC). The PRC’s function was to deal with foreign policy, defense policy and international economic issues and would be chaired by a variety of cabinet secretaries. The SCC’s responsibilities were covert intelligence and other sensitive operations, arms control and crisis management and would be chaired exclusively by Brzezinski. Carter then took it one step further by elevating the national security advisor to cabinet level and the palace coup was complete before Gerald Ford left the White House. In a fundamental break with the past, Brzezinski’s SCC would now be at the center of American foreign policy and not the State Department.

As recalled with relish by the Neoconservative author and professor of international relations David J. Rothkopf in Charles Gati’s 2013 book ZBIG, “It was a bureaucratic first strike of the first order. The system essentially gave responsibility for the most important and sensitive issues to Brzezinski, and the vague definition of what constituted crisis management essentially ensured that if anything came up that was important it could be claimed by the White House.”

The new structure effectively froze the incoming Secretary of State, Cyrus Vanceout of the decision-making process before Carter had even entered the Oval Office. More importantly, it also delivered to Brzezinski control over covert action and a free hand to use it wherever he saw fit. Former CIA Director Robert Gates recalled how President Carter pushed for covert action over diplomacy from the very beginning of his administration in his 1997 book From the Shadows. “Indeed, as Carter turned to covert action within weeks after his inauguration and increasingly frequently thereafter, the most constant criticism of CIA that I heard from both Brzezinski and Aaron was its lack of enthusiasm for covert action and its lack of imagination and boldness in implementing the President’s ‘findings’ (legal shorthand for covert actions).”

One bold, imaginative operation initiated by Brzezinski in 1977 was theNationalities Working Group (NWG),dedicated to weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming ethnic tensions among the Islamic populations of the South Asia region. Already in Kabul to help implement the plan was Graham Fullerwhose expertise as CIA operative was on politicizing Islamic radicals on behalf of American interests. As the CIA’s Kabul station chief from 1975 to 1978 Fuller was perfectly placed to provide the intelligence and the contacts necessary to coordinate Brzezinski’s covert pressure from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and China with the CIA’s next big adventure; Afghanistan.

Brzezinski’s rewiring didn’t stop at covert action but continued on into nuclear policy toward the Soviet Union beginning immediately after assuming control. On February 3, 1977 Carter attended the first session of Brzezinski’s SCC on the long delayed Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) at which a competing initiative to the State Department’s was put into action. Limiting the growth of nuclear weapons and delivery systems available to the Pentagon under de’tente had been an ongoing process with the Soviets under two previous presidents with agreed to protocols and expectations. Now Carter suddenly shifted the SALT structure from limitation to deep cuts forcing an unprepared Vance to fly off to meet the unprepared Soviets with a proposal that was guaranteed to fail.

Brzezinski’s aggressive approach was no surprise to some on his staff who believed the offer was intended as a trick to “show up the Soviets for what they were.” But the evidence of Brzezinski’s rigging the deck against Vance was even clearer. David J. Rothkopf writes, “Brzezinski shepherded the process closely and even went so far as having William Hyland, working for the NSC, oversee the delivery of the negotiating instructions to ensure that they did not get into the hands of the State Department until the instant of their departure.”

With Vance’s hands tied by the President, a Russophobic Brzezinski expanding nuclear targeting options from 25,000 to 40,000 and covert action teams sabotaging behind Soviet lines from early 1977 onward, it doesn’t take much to imagine what the Soviets were thinking. Brzezinski and Carter were letting the Soviets know they were ripping up SALT and De’tente as well as the very assumptions both were based on. Rothkopf quotes Carter Defense Secretary Harold Brown. “Brzezinski had, I think, a more apocalyptic view of the world and especially a different attitude toward the Soviets” he believed that concessions to the Russians merely encouraged them to press further, and he was willing to use almost any device or any other relationship with other countries to contain them.”

Brown goes on to say Brzezinski believed that the United States “should use China as a weapon against the Soviets”. But it was in Afghanistan, in the run up to the Afghan crisis where the results of Brzezinski’s weaponizing can best be seen not to mention the faint traces of off-the-books secret agencies helping him do it. Selig Harrison , former Washington Post foreign correspondent and Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace commented on Brzezinski’s role in fomenting the crisis in Afghanistan in his book, co-authored with Diego Cordovez Out of Afghanistan: “Brzezinski had steadily eroded Vance’s power, persuading the President to transfer jurisdiction over the CIA from the Inter-Agency Policy Review Committee, headed by the Secretary of State, to the National Security Council’s Special Coordinating Committee [SCC] which Brzezinski chaired as the National Security Advisor. This control over covert operations enabled Brzezinski to take the first steps toward a more aggressively anti-Soviet Afghan policy without the State Department’s knowing much about it.”

Brzezinski’s plot to weaponize China against Russia by sacrificing Afghanistan was straight out of James Burnham’s Machiavellians and the spontaneous April, 1978 Marxist coup against the King’s cousin, Mohammed Daoud played like clockwork directly into his “predictions” of Soviet infiltration and subversion. Harrison writes, “Vance recalls that the April coup was depicted by Brzezinski as the opening gambit in a Soviet master plan for achieving hegemony in Southwest Asia. It would be followed in due course, Brzezinski argued, by the incorporation of Afghanistan into the Soviet orbit and ultimately by political and military moves to subjugate the Gulf oil-producing states.”

Vance rejected Brzezinski’s argument out of hand. As supported at the time by the State Department’s own intelligence and later revealed by post-Soviet research, the coup appeared to be a spur of the moment outburst by disorganized, repressed political factions unsure of exactly what they were doing. Vance found no evidence of Soviet complicity in the coup and even Brian Crozier would later have to admit in his autobiography that none would ever materialize. In fact, the evidence suggests that the 1978 Marxist coup in Afghanistan was the end result of CIA, Pakistani and Iranian efforts to undermine Daoud’s regime, and was only supported by the Soviets after it had become a fait accompli. Brzezinski’s prediction was ideological wish-fulfillment, more in line with discredited right-wing ISC reports or something conjured by the mind of Team B than with any sober professional analysis of Soviet intentions. And, had it been the first shot in a Soviet master plan to seize Southwest Asia and the Middle East, the April coup plotters Nur Mohammed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin would never have been Moscow’s choice to lead it. According to David Newsom, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs who visited Kabul after the coup and met with the coup leaders, “My assessment was that we were dealing with a regime that hadn’t found itself. There were divisions in it and it was still on probation in Soviet eyes.”

Terror in Soviet eyes was more like it. The coup plotters were divided into two main factions that fought bitterly and the coup organizer, Hafizullah Amin had been brought to the United States by a CIA front organization on two separate occasions to be educated. According to the KGB chief Alexander Morozov, the KGB later discovered Amin’s instructions to the plotters severely forbade them from informing the Russians of the plan lest they try to stop it. Amin had even admitted to the KGB that he’d taken money from the CIA. He had studied for a doctorate at Columbia University and headed up the Afghan Student Association at a time when (as exposed by Ramparts Magazine) it too was being used as a CIA recruitment tool for future Third World leaders. Hafizullah Amin was now one of those leaders and Vance was sending a new, tough and savvy American Ambassador to Kabul named Adolph “Spike” Dubs to deal with him.

A Russian-speaking Soviet specialist who’d served in Moscow and as a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near East and South Asia Affairs, Dubs came with a complex plan to bring Amin closer to the U.S. but not close enough to set off alarms in Moscow. The Carnegie Endowment’s Selig Harrison had flown into Kabul to meet with him after he’d taken over in the summer of 1978 and found him optimistic. We interviewed Harrison in his Washington office in 1993 about Dubs’ plan. “Dubs” came out there with a very sophisticated conception of what he was going to do politically; which was to try to make Amin into a Tito — or the closest thing to a Tito/Ceausescu — detach him. He’d still be pretty close to the Russians but he’d have more freedom of action and it would be enough to make it safe from our point of view. And Brzezinski of course thought that was all nonsense” which as you say was all part of a self-anointed prophecy. It was all very useful to the people like Brzezinski. Afghanistan was a great vindication of their point of view and so they were trying to polarize the situation.”

Copyright – 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series

Part 1: MI6 intelligence has always been an anti-Soviet/Russian “Rumor Factory”

Part 2: America’s “Soviet problem” is the old “Russia problem” that European Imperialists have been facing since Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812

Part 3: How U.S. foreign policy came to be directed by a diabolical, London-backed, privately funded, neoconservative/right-wing alliance

Part 4: How the Safari Club became the real CIA

Part 5: Brzezinski’s Safari Club “Friends” Did the Dirty Work Behind the Scenes

Part 6: The Death of Adolph Dubs – Cui bono? ‘To whom is it a benefit?’

Part 7: The Coup d’e’tat —

OpEdNews 6/24/18  blogguest Veterans Today

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series: Read it and weep!

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

The 1814 Battle of Paris was between Russia, Austria and Prussia against France. The French surrendered March 31, forcing Napoleon to abdicate and go into exile. [Public domain]

“Psychological Action has nothing to do with the intellect, and everything to do with gut emotions. Having made a list, the next step is to find the right things to say to carefully select groups of voters.” Brian Crozier, Free Agent 1941-1991

The 1975 creation of the Washington Institute for the Study of Conflict, WISC was not the first time British intelligence had directly interfered in a contentious struggle for political power in the United States.  London had a direct hand in bringing the U.S. into both World Wars I and II. The British had schooled American OSS agents in the “dark arts” of trickery and deception during World War II, including future Reagan CIA director William Casey who’d served as OSS station chief in London. The post war CIA would be modeled on the political and secret services of the British Empire’s notorious East India Company; a company that would so impress banker and former Kennedy/Johnson Under Secretary of State and Bilderberg co-founder George Ball, he recommended it as a model for a world corporate government to replace the obsolete “nation state”. The CIA had worked hand in hand with Britain’s Information Research Department, IRD to establish the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and helped to fund Brian Crozier’s Institute for the Study of Conflict, ISC. But the WISC represented a new era in British involvement by marking a direct infusion of ultra-right-wing European and British politics into the highest level of Washington thinking without anyone realizing what it was or what it intended to do to American democracy.

The purpose for ISC’s founding in 1970, as stated by Crozier in his autobiography Free Agent was “in exposing the fallacies of ‘détente’ and warning the west of the dangers inherent in a policy of illusion”; the illusion being that the West could ever have any peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union. The “Institute” got off to a quick start in the U.S. by forging an alliance with the National Strategy Information Center, NSIC a right-wing neoconservative think tank founded by Frank Barnett, William Casey and Joseph Coors in 1962 and with links to the defense industry’s original anti-labor think tank, the American Security Council. ISC’s first major triumph came a short time later as a result of a collaboration with the ultra-right-wing Pinay Cercle when Crozier, his protégé Robert Moss and two ISC board members, Sovietologist Robert Conquest and Congress for Cultural Freedom editor Leo Labedz, produced an ISC Special Report attacking the basis for “peaceful co-existence” (and therefore the legitimacy of détente with the Soviet Union) called European Security and the Soviet Problem.

The study, financed by the right-wing Pinay group made no bones about its “Soviet problem” actually being the old “Russia problem” that European Imperialists had been hoping to solve since Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812. “The present rulers of the Soviet Union are heirs to the Tsar’s dominions,” it reads on page 1; concluding that “Their foreign policy is thus a hybrid of Great Russian imperialism and Marxist-Leninist ideology.” In a development that would have made George Orwell grin, Crozier’s team had turned the truth on its head by transforming Soviet calls for peace into a weapon to weaken western resolve thereby “making peace” a new a kind of waging war and anyone who aspired to it as part of a Soviet conspiracy.

Determined to undermine détente, the aging right-wing former French Prime Minister, Antoine Pinay was so delighted with Crozier’s double-speak he presented the study in person to both President Nixon and Henry Kissinger and by 1975 the group was staged to make their move on Washington. The timing was perfect.

On March 3, 1975, less than two months before the fall of Saigon, the US Committee of the ISC (USISC) was launched which would act as the parent body of the Washington Institute for the Study of Conflict. With the humiliation of Vietnam now a millstone around the neck of the Washington bureaucracy, Crozier and Pinay’s extremism no longer looked so extreme. The ISC had been created specifically with CIA backing to give discredited right-wing, anti-Communist and anti-union clichés in Britain the cover of legitimacy. Or as Edward Herman and Gerry O’Sullivan write in their book The Terrorism Industry,  “ISC would provide anti-communist propaganda under the guise of ‘independent research’ and analysis… based on ‘evidence’ that came from the files of well-known and discredited right-wing organizations whose material only took on respectability when laundered through ISC.”

The ISC’s stamp of approval had provoked the British intelligence services to act on their own disinformation and black propaganda to the extent they had plotted to overthrow an elected British government in a military coup and replace it with one to their liking. Now the group that had manufactured that black propaganda for the British military to use, the ISC was establishing an American satellite organization to do the same in the U.S.

Despite the growing public scandal over the CIA’s use of Crozier’s Forum World Features as a London-based fake news service, Washington’s elites were rolling out the red carpet to welcome them and were leaving some British journalists bewildered. Steve Weissman summed up his astonishment in an August 1976 article for London’s Embassy Magazine. “Crozier, of course, isn’t the only one to be acutely embarrassed by the CIA scandals. But his story touches on what might become one of the more intriguing questions of the entire affair. For even as the [U.S.] Congress was investigating some of Crozier’s covert propaganda activities in Latin America, he and his colleagues were helping to set up a new Institute for the Study of Conflict right in the heart of Washington, D.C. And among the Americans involved with him in this highly suspect intervention into the American political scene are two of the most likely candidates [George Ball and Zbigniew Brzezinski] to serve as the next Secretary of State.”

Under the Chairmanship of Ball, WISC appeared a veritable who’s who of high-level ex-CIA, neoconservative and right-wing influencers bent on striking back at the Soviet Union for their humiliation in Vietnam. Senator John McCain’s father, the Admiral John S. McCain Junior, recent Commander in Chief of US Pacific Forces (CINCPAC) and a board member of the Military/Industrial think tank American Security Council had worked closely with ISC to get the WISC off the ground. Rhodes Scholar and NSIC President Frank Barnett was another committee member with long held ties to hardline neoconservative organizations such as the Smith Richardson Foundation and American Security Council.  Kermit Roosevelt, high level CIA officer who’d staged the 1953 coup in Iran that overthrew the duly elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh and senior CIA officer Robert W. Komer architect of the U.S. government’s notorious Phoenix Program in Vietnam.  From Georgetown University came WISC’s first President James Theberge, who’s two books on Soviet influence in the Caribbean – helped provide the pretexts for overthrowing Chile’s legitimately elected leftist president Salvador Allende. And then there was Richard Pipes, the virulently anti-Soviet history professor from Harvard University, who would soon be hand-picked for his political bias to lead a radical right-wing, neoconservative attack on the CIA known as Team B. Using the ISC’s methodology of fabricated threats and disinformation to win over intelligence elites at the CIA, Team B was at first seen by some inside the agency for what it was: “[A]n ideological, political foray, not an intellectual exercise. We knew the people who were pleading for it;” said one intelligence professional. Acquiesced to by then CIA director George Bush, in retrospect Team B’s politicized challenge to the CIA’s authority is viewed by many as the central mistake that permanently crippled the agency’s effectiveness. In the words of Lawrence J. Korb, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1985, Pipes and the Team B were the real reason for the intelligence failures represented by 9/11 because they were “hard-liners who created the concept out of an unwillingness to accept the unbiased and balanced judgments of intelligence professionals.”

But in the end the Team B gained friends and influence inside the broader intelligence and defense community and with the appointment of fellow WISC member Zbigniew Brzezinski as President Carter’s national security advisor, British intelligence agent Brian Crozier’s plan to infiltrate and subvert the détente process with the Soviet Union was complete.

That is not to say Brian Crozier was at all happy with the election of Jimmy Carter. He writes in his autobiography Free Agent, “Although fundamentally pro-American, I was explicitly and actively anti-Carter. Not only had I attacked Jimmy Carter’s policies in my National Review and Now! columns and elsewhere, but I had also provided anti-Carter material to other journalists, American as well as British.”

Crozier believed the Carter election would only worsen “the self-emasculation of American intelligence”. His belief “[T]hat the entire security apparatus of the United States was in a state of near collapse,” provoked yet another move to interfere in American politics, but this time beyond disinformation and black propaganda and into directed action. “The question was whether something could be done in the private sector – not only in Britain, but in the United States and other countries of the Western Alliance.” He writes in his autobiography.  “A few of us had been exchanging views, and decided that action was indeed possible. I took the initiative by convening a very small and very secret meeting in London.”

Crozier’s secret meeting in “the luxurious executive suite of a leading City of London bank on the morning of Sunday 13 February 1977” would produce a secret off-the books “Private Sector Intelligence agency, beholden to no government, but at the disposal of allied or friendly governments for certain tasks which, for one reason or another, they were no longer able to tackle…” including “[S]ecret counter-subversion operations in any country in which such actions were deemed feasible.”

The name of Crozier’s operation was the 6I, obscure shorthand for the 6^th International, a name that harkened back to Crozier’s mentor, James Burnham, secretary to the Communist 4^th International’s Leon Trotsky from 1934 – 1940.  But Crozier needn’t have worried about the Carter administration’s anti-Russian resolve. Carter and Brzezinski had rewired the command structure at the White House before they’d even entered the Oval Office and within a short time of their arrival had maneuvered the government away from détente and a bi-lateral foreign policy toward the Soviet Union and China toward the right-wing goals of the Washington Institute for the Study of Conflict.

Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series: Read it and weep!

Part 1: MI6 intelligence has always been an anti-Soviet/Russian “Rumor Factory”

Part 2: America’s “Soviet problem” is the old “Russia problem” that European Imperialists have been facing since Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812

Part 3: How U.S. foreign policy came to be directed by a diabolical, London-backed, privately funded, neoconservative/right-wing alliance

Part 4: How the Safari Club became the real CIA

Part 5: Brzezinski‘s Safari Club “Friends” Did the Dirty Work Behind the Scenes

Part 6: The Death of Adolph Dubs – Cui bono? ‘To whom is it a benefit?’

Part 7: The Coup d’état –

OpEdNews 6/22/2018  Veterans Today blogspot NexusNewsFeed.com

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series: Read it and weep!

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

While the British were urging men of the empire to fight in WWI, they were secretly forcing President Wilson to enter the war against the will of the American people.  [Public Domain]

“The ultimate sophistication of subversion is to take over the government, not by unlawful but by lawful means.

Brian Crozier, Free Agent 1941-1991

According to the dean of American intelligence scholars Loch K. Johnson as reported in the New York Times, the real story about alleged “Russian meddling” in America’s presidential election is that the United States meddles in other nation’s elections and in a big way. But the extent of Britain’s secret services meddling in American politics – at least since – the beginning of the 20^th century would shock even the most devout cheerleaders of ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele and his “dirty dossier”.

In a case oddly reminiscent of America’s current hysteria over the Russians, British intelligence even meddled with its own government back in the mid-1970s when panicked right-wing elements of the military plotted a coup d’ etat of Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson based on information generated by their own disinformation campaign about the Soviet Union. As told by Colin Wallace, a psychological warfare specialist for the British army working to smear Wilson and other British politicians as Soviet puppets: “One of the main byproducts of the disinformation campaign in 1973-74 was the dramatic growth of paramilitary organizations. Bearing in mind that these people were motivated for the real reasons one can only surmise that the bulk of the information that they were reacting to was the disinformation which we and other parts of the government apparatus was producing at that stage. One of the other side effects of the psychological operations is that once we actually created false information about an individual or an organization, members of the intelligence community also believed it.”

Do you get that America? In 1974 Britain’s intelligence services plotted the overthrow of their own elected government in London which they had convinced themselves with their own lies had been infiltrated and subverted by KGB agents from Moscow whom they, themselves had invented. Continuing to accuse anyone who opposes the “Russians did it narrative” as working for the Russians is what used to be called paranoid right-wing McCarthyism, and the anti-Putin bureaucracy is pouring gasoline on themselves by continuing to push it. The Democratic Party has long used falsified evidence to move the United States to war against London’s enemies and the British government has a reputation for producing dirty dossiers to help them. The “leak” of the 1917 Zimmerman telegram(conveniently intercepted by British intelligence) was “arranged” so as to make it politically impossible for Democratic President Woodrow Wilson to fulfill his promise to keep the United States out of World War I. In the spring of 1940, more than a year and half before America’s entry into World War II, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) created a massive covert operation in New York City known as the British Security Coordination(BSC) to conduct an illegal campaign of political subversion, propaganda and sabotage inside the United States (to frame Germany). Initiated by Winston Churchill with the private approval of Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt and the cooperation of the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, who insisted “that no other US government department, including the Department of State should be informed of it”, BSC’s purpose was to manipulate a neutral United States once again into war with Germany. Then once Germany was dispensed with, Winston Churchill followed up with his Iron Curtain speech in the spring of 1946 and the foundation for the Cold War with the Soviet Union was laid.

The documented history of the BSC compiled by BSC officers after the war and published in 1998 as The Secret History of British Intelligence , details how deeply British intelligence penetrated American politics before during and after World War II while providing the inspiration and cultural continuity for America’s Cold War national security state that followed. Military historian Nigel West expresses his disbelief in the introduction. “Overall, the history falls into two distinct parts, pre- and post-Pearl Harbor, and reveals the lengths taken to influence US public opinion and isolationist politicians. In particular the willingness of American radio commentators, then a very influential medium, to peddle what amounted to foreign propaganda, will shock.”

Even more shocking is how today’s influential commentators march in lockstep with their 1940s counterparts in words and deeds as they once again peddle propaganda cooked up in London to undermine an American president and prepare the United States for fighting yet another and most likely final World War against the old British Empire’s most formidable enemy; Russia.

Unconstitutional in the extreme, these kinds of covert operations were privatized in the 1970s to avoid accountability and today work in tandem with corporate/business intelligence services such as London based Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., Hakluyt & Co. and Fusion GPS, but the overall objective remains the same: Manipulating public opinion through subversion, propaganda and sabotage in order to covertly make the case for war a fait accompli. The Trump dossier is a crude piece of unsubstantiated character assassination that circulated for months among journalists who knew better than to use it and that even the FBI has yet to verify. Yet in their wonton desire to delegitimize Trump and his constituency, his enemies in the Democratic Party and Federal bureaucracy, bet the farm on it. Former MI6 agent, author Christopher Steele and his business partner and co-director Christopher Burrows are highly regarded Kremlin experts who’d previously worked at Britain’s Foreign Office.

It’s not unreasonable to ask what two highly regarded Kremlin experts are doing peddling unsubstantiated salacious rumor and innuendo. But as the BSC’s history demonstrates – establishing a “Rumor Factory” – is exactly what MI6 intelligence experts are trained to do, replete with important rules to follow:

1. A good rumour should never be traceable to its source.

2. A rumour should be of the kind which is likely to gain in the telling.

3. Particular rumours should be designed to appeal to particular groups.

4. A particular rumour should have a specific purpose. The objectives of rumor spreading may be many, but a single rumour cannot be expected to serve more than one of them.

5. Rumours are most effective if they can be originated in several different places simultaneously and in such a way that they shuttle back and forth, with each new report apparently confirming previous ones.

Creating a successful rumour assumes of course that you will never get caught in the act and if ever traced back to the source you will never have to testify to it in court. The BSC excelled at devising new ways to harass Nazis. An operation known as Station M was created to fabricate letters and documents and came up with a game called Vik so even civilians could play at it. “A Nazi, they said ‘can be telephoned at all hours of the night and when awakened can be apologetically assured that it is the wrong number; the air can disappear mysteriously out of his motor tires; shops can be telephoned on his behalf and asked to deliver large quantities of useless and cumbersome goods… his lady friend can receive anonymous letters stating that he is suffering from mysterious diseases” a rat might die in his water tank” his favorite dog might get lost.'”

Prior to and all through World War II the BSC prided itself at spreading low brow fabricated rumours about the Nazi leadership in the name of the “forces of Democracy,” and continued on to new lows against the Soviets during the Cultural Cold War through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), and Britain’s CIA-supported Information Research Department the IRD. According to Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, authors of Britain’s Secret Propaganda War , “the vast IRD enterprise had one sole aim: To spread its ceaseless propaganda output (i.e. a mixture of outright lies and distorted facts) among top-ranking journalists who worked for major agencies and magazines, including Reuters and the BBC, as well as every other available channel. It worked abroad to discredit communist parties in Western Europe which might gain a share of power by entirely democratic means, and at home to discredit the British Left”.

London operated as propaganda central in the 1980s for the Soviet War in Afghanistan and a recruitment hub for radical Islamic groups like the Taliban afterward. But the 1970 creation of the IRD’s privatized spinoff, the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC) marked an evolution in the degree to which the techniques of infiltration and propaganda could be used to create a façade of legitimacy for right-wing causes. It also provided a platform for a right-wing element of Western intelligence services to plot against their own governments and covertly make the rise of an authoritarian neoconservative agenda a fait accompli.

As presented by Edward Herman and Gerry O’ Sullivan in their 1989 study, The Terrorism Industry,“The London-based Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC) provides an especially well-documented case study of the use of a purportedly ‘independent’ institute as a front for propaganda operations of hidden intelligence agency and corporate sponsors. In 1968, and again in the mid-1970s, ISC’s principal, Brian Crozier, was revealed in the British press to have been an agent of British and U.S. intelligence, to have served secretly as a propaganda conduit for the South African police, and to have colluded with British firms and trade associations in a campaign to smear British trade Unions with the tar of subversion. This did not in any way discredit Crozier as a Western expert.”

If Brian Crozier’s exposure as a spy did anything it only enhanced his reputation as a Cold Warrior dedicated to defeating what he called Moscow’s “war called peace.”

As a devoted acolyte of the very first neoconservative, James Burnham, Crozier brought to his secret world of rightwing businessmen, intelligence, police and military officials a strategic plan to use the media to move the West’s liberal democracies to the ideological right by fabricating threats of Communist subversion. In doing so, he got the CIA, Richard Mellon Scaife, The Ford Foundation , Shell Oil, British Petroleum, the Heritage Foundation and an exclusive secretive right-wing business group known as the Pinay Cercle , to pay for it. Crozier shared Burnham’s view that the West and the Soviet Union were in a war for civilization and had to be fought with politics, subversion, terrorism and psychological warfare. Citing Burnham’s oblique defense of Joe McCarthy in his 1954 book The Web of Subversion , his greatest concern was “not with open, professed, Communists,” he wrote in 1976, but “with the underground–the illegal apparatus, and the hidden, secret Communist agents and collaborators.”

Like Burnham, Crozier believed that trade unions, peace groups and the non-communist left had no legitimate concerns of their own but were witting and unwitting fronts for a vast Soviet plot. But his biggest concern was for what he believed to be the KGB’s infiltration and subversion of Western governments which mandated a preemptive counterinsurgency or even military coups d’ etat to thwart. In Britain this took the shape of a covert campaign against the Labor government of Harold Wilson, the discrediting of Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe with “black information” and the replacement of Conservative leader Edward Heath with someone willing to act on the fabricated threats and outright lies the ISC and other right-wing organizations were feeding them. As retold by The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland summarizing the BBC2 docudrama, “The Plot Against Harold Wilson”. “It sounds fantastic, almost comic. But watch [Alexander] Greenwood talk of setting up his own private army in 1974-75. Listen to the former intelligence officer Brian Crozier admit his lobbying of the army, how they ‘seriously considered the possibility of a military takeover’. Watch the archive footage of troop manoeuvres at Heathrow, billed as a routine exercise but about which Wilson was never informed – and which he interpreted as a show of strength, a warning, even a rehearsal for a coup.”

As revealed by West German intelligence officer Hans Langemann in a 1982 Der Spiegel Magazine article titled “Victory for Strauss,” throughout the 1970s Crozier facilitated “a transnational security organization,” that helped to successfully replace numerous labor, liberal or centrist governments with ultra-conservative ones. Working alongside right-wing elements of business, the military and police in France, Britain, Switzerland and the United States, a variety of tactics had extended to “Covert Financial Transactions for Political Purposes”” “Organizing public demonstrations”” “Carrying out international campaigns with the aim of discrediting hostile personalities”” “Recruiting writing contributions by certain, well-known journalists in Britain, the U.S. and other countries,” “Ensuring a lobby in influential circles”” and the establishment of offices “with full-time coordinators and operational plans for London, Washington, Paris, Munich and Madrid.” Left unreported in the United States and thereby unknown to most Americans, Crozier and his ISC were the hidden hand of British intelligence, guiding the post-Vietnam rise of the neoconservatives and the gradual transfer of power through its Washington branch, the Washington Institute for the Study of Conflict, WISC – into the hands of a right-wing military industrial cabal bent on using the United States as a host for Britain’s long lost imperial conquest of the Eurasian continent.

Copyright – 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series

Part 1: MI6 intelligence has always been an anti-Soviet/Russian “Rumor Factory”

Part 2: America’s “Soviet problem” is the old “Russia problem” that European Imperialists have been facing since Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812

Part 3: How U.S. foreign policy came to be directed by a diabolical, London-backed, privately funded, neoconservative/right-wing alliance

Part 4: How the Safari Club became the real CIA

Part 5: Brzezinski’s Safari Club “Friends” Did the Dirty Work Behind the Scenes

Part 6: The Death of Adolph Dubs – Cui bono? ‘To whom is it a benefit?’

Part 7: The Coup d’e’tat —